This invention relates to systems and methods for calculating and printing on a label, weight, price and descriptive information of consumer products.
In establishments such as supermarkets, it has been the practice to pre-package and weigh certain random weight products such as meat, and to place a label on the packages. Typically, the label includes a description of the product, its net weight, its unit price per pound, and the total purchase price.
Recently, a uniform product code (U.P.C.) consisting of machine-readable indicia in the form of sequential stripes have been placed on the labels also. That code contains the product commodity number (a numerical designation of product description) as well as the cost of the product. Thus, when the product is presented at a checkout counter, the clerk need merely use a scanner to read out the encoded information. In response to the reading obtained by the scanner, the identity and cost of the item is noted and may be printed on a final sales receipt.
A problem associated with the weighing and labeling procedure described above is that the initial preparation of the product label has been time consuming and subject to error. Specifically, a human-readable description of the product for use on the label was typically printed by inserting embossed or molded slugs into a label printer for printing the product description. The U.P.C. number might be generated by inserting a metal key whose edge or edges are configured to reproduce the desired U.P.C. number. However, it has generally been the case that the U.P.C. code could not be printed on the label in the same operation or with the same printer in which the product description was printed. Thus, two printing operations were required or two labels were required, one for the human-readable product description and one for the U.P.C. code.
An additional problem involved the printing of the price information on the label. Where metal slugs were used for product description, those slugs might also contain manually pre-patterned holes for generation of the price information. By inserting such slugs, an operator could cause an optical scanner to detect the price information and cause the printer to print that information on the label.
Not only is the above-described method of price encoding tedious, but it becomes even more troublesome when the price of a product is changed, as for example when a product is the subject of a special sale price. To reflect the new price, the slug holes have to be rearranged manually, thereby providing new opportunities for error. Accordingly, prior methods and apparatus for pre-printing labels have proven to be less efficient and reliable than desired.